Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases

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Alternative

Grizzly Bear, “Veckatimest” (Warp). The Brooklyn art-pop ensemble’s third effort justifies the substantial raving done on the band’s behalf by the likes of Paul Simon, Radiohead and every quality-starved music scribe in the country (including yours truly). Recorded in a dilapidated church in the band’s home borough, “Veckatimest”— I have no idea what the title signifies, unfortunately— is a record dripping with ambition and bolstered by what sure sounds like an encyclopedic knowledge of arty rock records ranging from “Pet Sounds” to “OK Computer.” Singer Edward Droste possesses a stirring voice given to falsetto flight, and the harmonies that bathe the hipster pastiches of keyboards and guitar are nothing short of sublime. If the 2006 release “Yellow House” suggested abundant promise, here is the make-good on that promise. Outstanding. ★★★★( Jeff Miers)

Jazz

Kyle Eastwood, “Metropolitan” (Candid/Mack Avenue). The Sons Also Rise. What you’ve got here is the fourth disc by bassist Kyle Eastwood, son of the jazz-loving, sometime pianist and movie star/director you-know-who. It’s co-produced by Erin Davis, one of the sons of Miles Davis. It was recorded in Paris with European musicians, most significantly trumpet player Till Bronner and French keyboardist Manu Katche. It’s mostly post-fusion “contemporary jazz,” which is sometimes better news than it is at other times. “Bold Changes” is really nothing of a sort but rather an impressive ballad delivered by Bronner and Eastwood’s frequent tenor saxophonist Graeme Blevins. When you hear Eastwood on “Hot Box” doing his best Jaco, you have to admit the kid’s plenty talented on his own. And “Bel Air” sounds like something that would be more than comfortable as background music for one of Clint’s films. Earthshaking it’s not, but likable though it certainly is. ★★★ (Jeff Simon)

•••

Louis Armstrong, The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions (1935-1946) (Mosaic Records, seven discs by mail only from Mosaic Records, 35 Melrose Place, Stamford, Conn. 06902 or www.mosaicrecords.com ). Louis Armstrong’s longest relationship with any record label in his 48 years of making records was with Jack Kapp’s label Decca, the onetime powerhouse that also housed Bing Crosby, Frances Langford and the Mills Brothers (all of whom appear here). You can understand why listening to the incredible variety on these seven discs, everything from Armstrong rejoining his precious old New Orleans mates Clarence Williams and Sidney Bechet to recording with “Iona and His Islanders” and Louis Armstrong with the Polynesians. The quality of music isn’t always anywhere near the level of musical kitsch involved, but there’s so much music on this gorgeous box set and so much of it is so good that the whole thing is a wonderful compendium of Armstrong’s second life in jazz—the one where the New Orleans music he helped invent merged with the swing that was conquering a Depression- rocked world. Genius, after all, is genius. ★★★ 1/2 ( J. S.)

Rock

Chickenfoot, “Chickenfoot” (Redline). While it has certainly been nice having the original Van Halen back on speaking terms and on the road again, it hasn’t been that nice around here—no Van Halen area date for us. No confirmed new album from that band, either. So this, the debut effort from supergroup Chickenfoot—Van Halen alums Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar, with the considerably able Joe Satriani and erstwhile Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith making like Eddie and Alex Van Halen— will satisfy your VH jones for the time being. The record is exactly what the band’s membership suggests it would be—a big, fat, funky, sprawling riff fest, with killer hard rock/blues wailing from Hagar, those instantly recognizable high vocal harmonies from Anthony, and enough six-string histrionics to satisfy the shredder lurking within us all. Maybe these guys will deem Buffalo worthy of a visit. Play it loud. ★★★ 1/2 ( J. M.)

Bluegrass

Rhonda Vincent, “Destination Life” (Rounder). She’s the Empress of Bluegrass. You might even say that she is to bluegrass now what Aretha Franklin once was to soul music (though in Vincent’s case, she also has to share current royalty with the truly majestic Alison Krauss). So pure and crystalline is Vincent’s voice, so metallic is her control of it and so razor-keen is her harmonizing that you can begin to worry that her music could easily harden into some kind of icy robo-bluegrass. And then you hear this disc with her new band and all your fears are gone in a flash. Her new band the Rage stomps (especially banjo player Aaron McDaris) and there’s very little mechanical or Nashville-slick about the disc’s songs. (Some, to be sure. It’s in the water there.) Listen to this band wail on “Anywhere is Home When You’re With Me” and you’re in bluegrass paradise. ★★★ 1/2 (J. S.)

Classical

Scriabin, Piano Music: Poems, Waltzes and Dances performed by Xiayin Wang (Naxos). It has never exactly escaped notice that so many of the best Scriabin pianists have been female (Ruth Laredo and Hilde Somer, for instance). It isn’t that fire-breathing male piano virtuosos of the Horowitz and Richter stripe didn’t play Scriabin often and brilliantly, it’s just that Scriabin’s conspicuously small hands (especially compared to those of his composer/ pianist contemporary Rachmaninoff) and his music’s occasionally riotous sensuality so often find congenial interpreters among those who aren’t locked into more rigid “male” piano paradigms. Here is a beautiful young pianist with a superb Scriabin recital that is a bit eccentric even within Scriabin’s visionary oeuvre. She completely eschews the sonatas that are probably the keys to Scriabin’s entire musical achievement and performs, in chronological order, selections from his entire composing life at the piano, from the composer of Chopinesque waltzes to the ecstatic and sometimes incendiary farewells to tonality in late Scriabin. Her performances are warm and intuitive and logical and completely non-rhetorical. The result is an extraordinary disclong journey into Scriabin’s increasingly sulfurous and mad world. ★★★ 1/2 ( J. S.)

•••

Philip Glass and Robert Moran, “The Juniper Tree: An Opera in Two Acts” (Orange Mountain Music). Philip Glass is pretty predictable. You always get those turning, shimmering, repetitive wheels of music. But I am starting to like him just for being tonal. I like him also for choosing this ghoulish but strangely beautiful Grimm fairy tale. Here is what happens: A widower marries a mean woman and has a daughter with her. But his wife hates his son from his first wife. She chops off the boy’s head, cooks him into a stew and feeds the stew to his father. The boy’s bones are buried under the juniper tree. A brilliant bird emerges from the tree and transfixes the townspeople with its song. The drama ends with the grisly death of the stepmother and the father and his two children being reunited. It’s inexcusable that Glass writes the same music over and over. “The Juniper Tree” sounds just like other Glass works. But on the plus side, this weird fairy tale fits his style well. The children’s songs call out for simplicity; the song the young daughter sings under the juniper tree is oddly sweet and moving. Glass doesn’t really attempt the magical bird song, just draws you into his trademark mirage of sound, and lets your imagination do the rest. Singers are excellent. Sanford Sylvan, who sang a beautiful “Schoene Muellerin” a few years ago at UB, is the father, and soprano Lynn Torgove sings the son and the juniper bird. ★★★( Mary Kunz Goldman)

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